Blacking something out is the easy half. The half that gets challenged is the schedule: what was removed, from which page, on what ground, why that ground applies to that passage, and who decided. Produced properly it usually ends the argument. Reconstructed six months later from a stack of marked-up copies it starts one.
The schedule is the part that gets argued about. Nobody disputes that a box is black. What gets disputed is whether it should have been, and that argument is conducted entirely on the schedule: this passage, this ground, this reason. A schedule that says "privileged" forty times invites the application that a schedule saying why does not.
The reason has to be about the passage, not about the ground. "Legal professional privilege, because it is privileged" is not a reason, and it is the most common entry in a bad schedule. What brings this particular passage within the ground: who it was between, what it was for, why it was confidential. Entries whose reason is too short to be one are marked on the page.
Describe what was removed without giving it away. "Advice from counsel on the prospects of the claim" tells the other side what kind of thing it is and enough to test the ground, without telling them the advice. That is the line to walk, and it is easier to walk on the day than six months afterwards.
Write it while you are doing the redacting. Every entry here takes half a minute at the time and twenty minutes to reconstruct later, and the reconstruction is worth less because it is a reconstruction. The thing that makes a schedule persuasive is that it was obviously written by somebody looking at the document.
It stays on this machine. A redaction schedule is a list of every sensitive passage in a disclosure, with a pointer to exactly where it is. That is a document to keep close. Nothing here is uploaded, and the export is a file you put wherever the rest of the matter lives.
No. SEAL does that, properly, by removing the content rather than drawing over it. This is the record of what was removed and why, which is a separate job and the one that gets challenged. Use both: SEAL for the file, this for the schedule.
Whatever the rules you are working under actually provide: privilege, irrelevance, commercial confidentiality, another person's personal data, a statutory exemption by name. The page suggests the common ones and accepts anything you type. A ground you cannot name precisely is usually one that will not hold.
Specific enough that somebody holding the document can find the passage: a page reference and a position on it. "Various" is the entry that invites the request for a better schedule.
Put the strongest ground first and mention the others in the reason. A schedule that lists three grounds for one passage reads as uncertainty about all three, which is the opposite of the intended effect.
No. The same schedule is what a public authority sends with a freedom of information response, what an organisation keeps when answering a subject access request, and what anybody sensible keeps when sending a redacted contract. The vocabulary differs and the discipline does not.